The Plague Star – PreGen Characters

The Plague Star uses Edge of the Empire rules, and has strong themes of disease, horrific beasts, telepathy, and genetic manipulation. It also takes place in a fictional universe which way too many people are unfamiliar with.

Here are the PreGen character sheets used for The Plague Star. I started by taking the basic build of every Class/Career combination from Edge of the Empire, except Force-Sensitive Exile, and tooling around with the rules a bit to get the desired outcome. I wanted to make things simple and and a bit of a blank slate for players to build on. To do so, I didn’t mess around with XP builds, but rather assigned some starting Characteristics, and then added a rank in each skill that a Career or Class granted access to. To further reinforce the “blank slate” idea, I put in a little empty avatar symbol for players to doodle their portraits on.

I then threw on some bonuses from my Starting Homes, supplemented with a brief description of a populated world in the 1,000 Worlds universe, a different world for each character. To further reinforce the importance (in my mind) of these worlds and their descriptions, I added a mechanic to encourage players to utilize their homeworld’s feel with an upgraded skill check for doing theme-appropriate actions.

I wanted to streamline things a bit, too, so you’ll notice that some weapons have properties like Pierce removed and simply added +1 to their damage. I wanted these to be able to be picked up by someone who had never played in the system and have them start playing immediately with almost no explanations needed.

Next, I handed out Force Powers to all characters to play off of the theme of telepathy and psionics. Again, to streamline, instead of requiring Force Die rolls, I just made everything chew up Strain.

Lastly, I wanted this adventure to have a massive death toll, and so created a completely new way of determining Wound and Strain thresholds, with a result well below the usual limits. Here, they are the sum of (Brawn x2, Agility, Presence) for Wounds and (Willpower x2, Intellect, Cunning) for Strain. It’s not realistic, I know. I don’t care.